a journal about life

Author: Bergamot Orange

Moving to Brasilia brought more opportunity for change besides geography. I also moved from the classroom to counseling. After 31 years of teaching, I have found taking a different role in the school organization to be energizing and challenging in all new ways. Every day, I draw upon all I have learned in my life about both the nature of being human and the nature of learning. Students and adults continually surprise me with their hidden motivations and thinly veiled vulnerabilities. Just because I occupy the office with the title Counselor on the door, people reveal themselves to me in a different way than they ever would have in a classroom. Much of the time, I feel there is a lot of good I can do, and sometimes, I feel overwhelmed.

Before I entered this job, a fellow counselor gave me a two word piece of advice: Self-Care. Of course I was already aware of taking time to nurture myself, but I took this as a mandate. I can feel now, more than ever, how other people draw off of my personal balance and strength to find their own courage and equilibrium. I start every day with meditation, and my intention for that time is to center my thoughts and emotions before I go out into the public or interact with anyone. I frequently use three sites depending on my mood or time- a weekly podcast from the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, podcasts by Tara Brach, and the Insight Timer. If you want to explore meditation, these could be ways to begin.

This is our private slice of jungle in our backyard where I learned how to meditate. I have spent hours watching the changing dappled sunlight and visiting wildlife, listening to cicadas, bird calls, and rainfall on the pool. It is a sanctuary.

My friend Dan has asked me before if a new adventure in my life is a new sentence, paragraph, chapter or book. I think this reiteration has to be a new book, but likely the last of a great series. Our family has had an awesome sequence of international school posts beginning in Singapore in 2000 and moving westward every 5 or so years to Kathmandu and Tunis. We are finally back in the Americas, in Brazil, getting a grip on the antipodal way of life. I frequently say to Allan, “So this is what Brazil is like.” It’s been almost a year and a half now, but we still feel amazed most days.

We are specifically in Brasilia, the capitol. It is confusing what Brasilia is. See, in the 1950s, the Brazilian government decided to move the capitol from Rio de Janeiro along with a significant portion of the population. It was a bit like the Westward Expansion in the United States. A location was chosen on the central plateau in a biome of shrubby pines and red dirt. They dammed a river to form a giant lake and built a purpose-designed “modern” city, in the shape of an airplane, with exorbitant expanses of green space, economical and convenient housing blocks, and public buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer that would signal to the world that Brazil was progressive and optimistic. It is honestly a wonderful place to live. At 3,000 ft. elevation, it has a mild sub-tropical climate with year-around temperatures between 70 and 80 degrees. Half of the year is rainy and the rest is dry. Compared to the coastal cities, Brasilia is very safe. It is also healthy with clean air, miles of bike lanes, and water sports on the lake.

That’s about all I’m going to explain for now. I hope to start showing this experience as one eats an elephant: one bite at a time. Just in closing, the header photo was last weekend at the Pantanal, a delta of the Amazon and the world’s largest wetland. My clever get-up was chosen to stay cool and dry while trying to keep chiggers from invading my skin. We spent hours each morning and evening on a boat taking in an incredible number of birds and constantly scouting for a jaguar- no show. Behind me is actually an inlet of the river completely covered by flowering lilly pads. So this is a little of what Brazil is like. More to come.

Porto is a city of serious historical depth with a pleasant industrial edge. Our apartment, Oh, Porto, is perched on the rocky hillside directly under this Eiffel era bridge. It might sound uncomfortable, but all of the architectural drama surrounding us is quite thrilling.

At the same time, Porto is incredibly friendly, just downright loving, and homey. We discovered this restaurant on our first night and will be having our third meal there tonight. The food is brilliant, but completely welcoming. This is the couvert or snacks they bring to your table. Various house-baked breads and crackers, olives, truffle butter, and fresh tomato creme fraiche. Everything is served in bakeware or tiny enamelware dishes. It is sweet and sophisticated at the same time.

We drove up and up and up. The roads became a succession of hairpin turns so close together that they filled the GPS screen with the traversing green lines. Spring rain turned to hard balls of hail. The medieval town of Sortelha, stone buildings low to the ground, blended in with the giant landscaping boulders.

All the while, we are listening to The High Mountains of Portugal, by Yann Martel. Tomas, the protagonist, is struggling to coax one of the first cars in Portugal up these mountains to recover a unique religious relic he needs to find. But Tomas is really working through his thoughts of the three people he loved most in the world: his son, the mother of his son, and his father, all lost in one week to diphtheria. He thinks that “love is a house with many rooms, this room to feed the love, this one to entertain it, this one to clean it, this one to dress it, this one to allow it to rest, and each of these rooms can also just as well be the room for laughing or the room for listening or the room for telling one’s secrets or the room for sulking or the room for apologizing or the room for intimate togetherness, and, of course, there are the rooms for new members of the household. Love is a house in which the plumbing brings bubbly new emotions every morning, and sewers flush out disputes, and bright windows open up to admit the fresh air of renewed goodwill. Love is a house with an unshakable foundation and an indestructible roof.” (Martel, 2015)

This metaphor is meaningful for all of the love relationships I have in my life, but none more than my 33 year long marriage. Every day, we explore the rooms of this big, old house, shifting spaces as our moods or necessity urges us. I never get tired of it, honestly never. Every day has a fresh energy that intrigues me.

After exploring the icy cobble-stoned alleys of Sortelha, we found a local country restaurant and warmed up with a dish of fluffy potatoes and bacalhou with a side dish of braised lamb. The potato dish incorporated turmeric and cardamom, reminiscent of Indian spices, but then that makes sense given the fierce way in which the Portuguese engaged in the spice trade. All of these factors are part of figuring out what Portuguese cuisine means.

Happy first day of spring from the hill country of Eastern Portugal. We took a big walk around this estate, Torre de Palma, after a Sunday afternoon rainstorm. I was singing Joni Mitchell about going to a party down a red dirt road. The clay soil clung so heavily to our boots that they created ankle weights for an additional workout.

Today is also Palm Sunday. In the village where we had lunch, mass was just letting out. The church bells were ringing at noon, and people were walking home with giant stalks of rosemary in their hands. I think it was their local version of the palm fronds.

We had a light lunch of local sheep cheese, Iberico ham, and thick slices of mushrooms only half cooked in olive oil and garlic. This was a little revelation to me. I always slice mushrooms too thinly and cook them too completely. They should still be raw and springy in the center, more like a slice of artichoke heart. Keeping things simple and a little raw seems like a good way to head into a fresh season.

Spring break road trips can be so thrilling. After months of nose-to-the-grindstone work following Christmas, it feels exhuberently freeing to not only have a week of unscheduled time, but also an open road promising new views and experiences. The Garmin is charged, and the audio book is downloaded, Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal just to keep up the atmosphere. We couldn’t have greater expectations.

But before we leave Lisbon, I must say a little something about dried cod or bacalhau. Like other items from Portuguese cuisine, port wine, for example, it was developed to keep on long ship journeys. It is shocking how far around the world this tiny country got during the age of exploration. Bacalhau is undeniably Portugal’s national dish and no one seems to be a bit tired of it. If you ask a nice Portuguese wine merchant where he would recommend you have lunch, he will tell you, his eyes taking a far-away gaze, to have the bacalhau at the place around the corner. And this would be an excellent recommendation, the cod coming to your table breaded, then oven baked on a mound of savory onions, in a pool of olive oil. Now I am getting that far-away look in my own eyes. This is a good comfort food.

A friend recently lent me the memoir of Lynsey Addario: It’s What I Do, A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. Lynsey was a war photojournalist in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya, where she was famously kidnapped and eventually released. Most of the book recounts shoots in intensely hot combat zones where she frequently risked her life to get the photos she posted back to American newspapers, at the end of the day.

She wrote about one conversation, though, that she had with an editor from National Geographic. He presented Lynsey with a different type of challenge. This editor advised her “Don’t shoot this story like a New York Times story. Take your time with it; get into it. Use the time you have to explore.” (Addario, 2015, pg. 271) She found this imperative a little frustrating because it meant retraining herself to shoot with “time and patience” which was not her typical style.

I have reflected, lately, that those of us who live in another country for an extended amount of time also have this luxury of time, but also a challenge to tell about our experiences slowly, one small layer at a time. Sometimes I feel like I am doing that, but there have been gaps of time when I have stopped exploring and noticing and have retreated back to merely living my life in the context of another country without truly being part of it.

For my birthday, Allan took me to the most northern tip of the Cap Bon Peninsula, El-Haouaria, somewhere we have intended to go since we moved here. This little village can see some tourist action at the height of summer, but we had the privilege to visit it at the end of winter, something few non-residents experience.

Our splendid inn, Dar Enesma, was cozied up with a fire in the main room and gentle radiator heat in the stylishly designed rooms. We quickly got onto the rhythm of village life through the sounds of the sea, free-ranging roosters and sheep, and the prayer calls from the tiny mosque.

For once, I got myself out early enough in the morning to take photos in the day’s best light. Down at the port, some of the fishermen were selling what they had already caught, while others were just gearing up to head out.

The best surprise of this visit, however, was this outstanding Italian restaurant, Bellariva. We were the only customers on Saturday night. Business is slow in winter, but from the second we entered, we knew we were going to have a special meal. There was no menu. The owner, Dalla Lina, suggested we first have a plate of house-made tagliatelle with a deep, rich porcini mushroom sauce. This was followed by a plate of her ravioli, stuffed with spinach and ricotta and topped with a tangy, fresh tomato and basil sauce. Finally, we had a plate of her long-braised rabbit, served with its own pan sauce of melted vegetables with soy-like richness. Dalla, married to a Tunisian man for 20 years, loves her seaside home and cooking for her traditional Italian restaurant, based on the local market ingredients. But whenever she yearns for bella Italia, she just hops on the flight to Milan and is back in 1 hour.

Ask the owner of Dar Enesma, Sonia Ouedder, to make a reservation at Bellariva for you. This will also ensure that it is open.